Oh, Those Freethinking Homeschoolers

I’m not sure exactly who or what gave them permission, but a certain subset of homeschoolers has decided it is okay to be freethinkers. Imagine! They have gotten it into their heads that it is possible to teach their children at home without regard to religion, dogma, or even conventional wisdom. Homeschooling on the basis of facts, logic, and science? What a positively UN-conventional idea!

One of the comments I hear so often from parents on SecularHomeschool.com is that they want their children to be able to think for themselves. To make up their own minds about their core values instead of following the crowd. To use cognitive thinking skills and individual creativity to grow into self-sufficient, freethinking young men and women.

But how does that play out in day to day homeschooling? Here are some of the ways that parents can help create a freethinking environment for their children at home...

• Make time for discussion. Notice that I didn’t say teaching. I said “discussion.” The back and forth sharing of ideas between parent and child is the single most important way to not only help a child realize that different viewpoints can be equally valid, and that age and experience don’t always guarantee “correctness”

• Encourage curiosity. A successful homeschooling day can often be measured by whether more questions were asked than were answered.

• Practice critical thinking. Every single day is full of thousands of individual choices. One of the biggest gifts we can give to our children is letting them not only see and hear us thinking through some of those choices out loud, but also, afterwards, sharing with them our feelings about the consequences of those choices - - both good and bad.

• Strewing knowledge. Strewing was a term I first heard on an unschooling blog relating to laying out educational materials and hoping children might pick them up and learn from them without being coerced. When it comes to homeschooling freethinkers, strewing is still quite appropriate. Nurturing knowledge and questioning requires providing a wide variety of information about a wide variety of subjects. A freethinking homeschool would do well to stock itself with books, videos, software, and music that opens the world up wide for children.

Oh, those freethinking homeschoolers. By homeschooling, they have already said, in effect, “I don’t HAVE to do what society mandates.” No one gave them permission to be a freethinking homeschooler. They decided that all for themselves. What a great way to start.